48: Marco Bought Four

17 Jan 2014

Implications of Google buying Nest, balancing skepticism with pragmatism, modern expectations of privacy, and Casey’s vast emoji archive.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up: whether iMessage problems are widespread, reasons behind flattening the Mac Mini, and HDR TVs.
• The storage costs of Casey's emoji.
• Google buying Nest for $3.2 billion.
• Ben Thompson on Google's business model.
• Nest has over 200 employees, including many ex-Apple employees.
• The Target-pregnant story.
• Marco's critical reading of Nest's statements.
• Maintaining a skeptical but pragmatic relationship with Google.
• Stephen Hackett's pants and regrets.
• Modern expectations of privacy.
• Potential for privacy laws like HIPAA applied to consumer technology.
• Google's public opinion is turning, but stories like this will never be in USA Today.
• Thought experiments with Apple buying Twitter, Dropbox, or Intel.
• After-show: Marco's house is filled with LEDs, John's house is filled with CFLs, and Casey's house is filled with apathy.

Sponsored by:

• Transporter: A private cloud storage drive that you own and control. Use code ATP for 10% off any Transporter.
• Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code MARCO for 10% off.
• Ting: Mobile that makes sense. No contracts, and pay only for what you use.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We have some follow up? Okay, guess not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m waiting for John to jump in there. I guess we’re done. All right, moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it okay for me to take a drink of water before the show starts? I thought I had time. You just jump right in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I’m a professional, John. I’m Johnny on the spot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We got an email from someone who works at an Apple store who prefers to remain anonymous, as those people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tend to do on the subject of Apple’s messages program and the iMessage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John service. and I will quote this little part from the email people who stopped by the Apple store with problems are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously not representative of iPhone users in general but I message is probably the top problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John among the folks who do stop by problems with I message are probably the top frustration with Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John products and services among the specialists in our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco store we got a number of people writing in saying it’s it’s always been fine for me you know but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there’s been enough reports of it being not fine for many people and something like that that’s a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good data point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah because obviously they They only see the people with problems, but they see everybody’s problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They are in the best position to decide what is the most common problem amongst all users of Apple products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John period. He’s not like just iPhone users or whatever. It’s across all of Apple’s products and services. He also says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in contrast to the common podcast, blog fodder, other iCloud problems, other than those stemming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from obvious gross users, are relatively rare. He’s saying that problems that are directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attributable to iCloud are not as big a deal as they’re made out, but iMessage is the number one frustration

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from people who come in to see them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, just as a user of iCloud, I use it kind of gently. I use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically Calendar and Contact Sync and not a lot of other features that it offers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The documents in the cloud I don’t really use and stuff like that. By using it lightly like that, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rarely see any problems. And I think that’s probably how most people use it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you mostly hear complaints about iCloud being weird and buggy and potentially awful is from developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are trying to develop against the sync APIs, which as we discussed before, have a lot of issues and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly some pretty fatal designs. The developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point of view of iCloud is very different from what the public are seeing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I wonder for people who are not fiddling around with stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they have undemanding use and they have like maybe three contacts and they don’t modify them that much, then maybe they don’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big deal. But if you have if you have tons of stuff and want it to work just so I want to play with all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those little iCloud syncing switches and everything and then something doesn’t work and it gets hosed and goes off into the weeds. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know if those people ever bother going to an Apple store because those are the type of people we’re going to try to figure it out themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think in a lot of cases when I cut doesn’t work, people just doesn’t just don’t notice. Or like you said, they blame the application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they don’t blame, you know, the phone or whatever. But yeah, The number of people who go into the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Store with software problems, that I guess is a different class of people because I would never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go into the Apple Store with a software problem I think as long as I can actually determine it was a software problem because what are they going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do for me? They’re just going to poke the same buttons that I can poke. It’s people who don’t know how to fix this stuff, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or if you want to say maybe it is a hardware problem, they’ll take it into the back room and hook it up to whatever machine they have that’ll run some diagnostic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, that was an interesting data point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else also, what percentage of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone users do you think don’t have any other Apple products and therefore don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see the syncing issues necessarily?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that could be the case too. I think only Apple knows those numbers, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many iPhone users also have a Mac, but I would love to know those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and I would assume it’s getting smaller and smaller as PCs are doing less and less well in the marketplace and Macs are doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey better and better. I’m sure that that’s getting to be smaller and smaller. But to use an anecdotal piece of evidence,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the first Apple device that I believe my dad got was either an iPad or an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I want to say it was an iPhone. And now, fast forward two or three years later, and pretty much my entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey immediate family, as in Aaron and I, as well as immediate family as in my parents and brothers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re almost exclusively Mac now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but you’ve just got to look at the sales numbers, though. How many iPhones has Apple sold in the past three years versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many Macs have they sold? I know sales are not the same as installed base, but the number of iPhones just massively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dwarfs the number of Macs in existence by this point. I’m thinking of like, you know, like all the old Macs that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are sitting around and how long do you keep counting? Like some ancient Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the PowerPC, and it’s still hanging around or whatever. But there’s just so many more iPhones and iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than Macs that you have to say most people who have iOS devices do not have Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, I would say, if I had to take a guess at what percentage of iPhone owners that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was their only Apple device I would say it’s probably like 50% or maybe even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s I think it’s like if you want to know the percentage if you look at all people who buy iPhones and say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what percentage of those have a Mac it’s I bet it’s very similar to the percentage of general population

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a Mac at this point because the iPhone is is a a mass-market general-purpose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John product I don’t think people see any real connection to the Mac but they just like it would never occur to them that if you’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iPhone that there was any connection to the Mac that you had to have a Mac that you should have a Mac anything and honestly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s true there’s nothing there’s nothing you’re gonna get out of having a Mac really I guess maybe a desktop version of the notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John application so why don’t you go to gaming PC yeah all right that’ll make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my friggin iPod shuffle sink better I hate that thing so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean most people don’t even sink their phones to their computers which is why Apple had to push for so long to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all this stuff over iCloud and backups and sync and wireless and iTunes match and all that other stuff. Keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in mind, it wasn’t that long ago. It’s easy to forget, but it was only iOS 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that brought most of that stuff that made you stop having to sync with iTunes to get a lot of these features.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That was not that long ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you remember the jailbreak app that would allow you to do Wi-Fi sync? It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey such a big deal. This was roundabouts of iOS 4 or 5. It was such a big deal because you could sync

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over Wi-Fi and people were like, oh my God, Apple, you have to do this immediately. They were like expecting a point release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of iTunes the next day to enable Wi-Fi sync. And I don’t recall exactly when it actually showed up in iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I remember that being such a big deal. And that was the brief window of time. It was around the brief window of time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I had actually had a jailbroken iPhone. And so I had thought about, I think at this point, re-jailbreaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just for that. And it was so silly. But yeah, it really wasn’t that long ago. You’re exactly right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then they implemented a Wi-Fi sync and nobody uses it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty much. Yeah, actually, I’m curious. What do you guys do for sync and backup?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I always connect with a cable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, typically I do as well. I think I have Wi-Fi sync enabled, but I believe I’m backing, well, I’m backing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up my iPhone to my computer and my iPad to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iCloud. But I actually have a gripe about this, which is branching away from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey follow-up, but since I’m talking, I’m just gonna continue. I think that because of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SMS logs, which I’m a pack rat and I don’t delete barely any of my SMS logs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I probably should go and call all of them. But I think it’s because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have four years of SMS logs or something like that. My iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey account, which I just have the free one, which is I believe five gigs, it is full the moment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I start backing my iPhone up to it. I’ve looked at the usage and settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I haven’t looked in a while, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details. But there was nothing that jumped out and said, oh, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no app or anything that oh, I’m using 34 gigs or anything like that. And the only thing I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can guess, because I believe I turned off the app backups to iCloud for just about everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it still was whining about not having enough space. And the only thing I can think of is I’ve got a gazillion SMSs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and perhaps more importantly, MMSs that have been around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey since 2008 when I got my 3GS that I think are trying to go to iCloud and failing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey miserably. And that’s kind of a bummer. And as everyone in the chat is saying, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am the king of sending animated gifts to people, which is certainly not helping. So that’s probably a self-created

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When you first started saying it was SMS, I was thinking, yeah, that’s like filling up a terabyte with Word documents. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now that you say, you know, yeah, that you get a lot of MMS and do a lot of image sending and receiving,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that actually makes a lot of sense because where is that stored? What is that categorized as? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, that really could be the problem. Plus, you know, your billions of emoji

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and especially imagine if Apple stores your emoji as images. Oh, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d be so doomed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It actually stores high DPI images of the text bubbles. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But you know what I’m saying? And it’s frustrating. So maybe I’m abnormal in that I don’t go through and call

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey text messages. And maybe most people are paranoid or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But for me, by me not taking action, in other words, by me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not going through and deleting old text messages and picture messages, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have put myself in a position where iCloud backup effectively doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me unless I pay for it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it pretty much is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my fault, but it’s interesting to me that when I do something that you would assume an average user would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do, which is just let SMSs and MMSs fly by and just let them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go into the ether. By doing that, I’ve set myself up in a position where I can’t use iCloud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or not effectively anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Does anybody pay for extra storage on iCloud?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would if I wanted to use it. If it was better than local backup in more ways, if it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as fast, if it kept all my passwords and encrypted it. There’s still things that iCloud backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does slightly differently. I’ve thought about paying for it many times and just go, And the reason I always use a cable to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do my backups is not because I’m against Wi-Fi syncing or anything. It’s just because my battery almost always needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be charged by the time I end up back at the computer. I’m plugging it in anyway to charge it. Why not also do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the backup then, right? And, you know, it’s just… I don’t particularly like it. I don’t think it’s…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I’ll go wireless eventually, but for now, I’ll keep doing it the old-fashioned way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and I believe iMIC pays for iCloud backup, and I think he is the only person on the planet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and his setup according to his statement on the prompt sounds pretty weird in general.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is either very uncommon or like every other non-geek in the world is just like him and we just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t see it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think what happens is like people get the free iCloud and then they run out of space on it because it’s not hard to blow through that space.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then they go to the Apple Store because they can’t figure out why their phone isn’t working and it’s giving them some message about being out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room or something or keeps asking them. I don’t understand what it’s saying to them. And eventually someone explains to them, it’s telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you that if you want to keep using your phone like you’ve been using it, you have to pay some amount of money. And they hate that, and they complain about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. But it’s better than learning a new way to do things. So I wonder if a lot of people just end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up not disliking Apple and having a bad feeling about Apple when that happens, which is why I said so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John times that they need to figure that out. Giving people that little taste is just setting them up for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad feelings later. But for most people, it’s easier than changing the way they do things. It’s like, well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just want to keep doing whatever it is I was doing, make this go away. Or maybe they could just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or I guess the alternative is they could just turn off iCloud backup. I’m not sure how many people take that alternative.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t need backups. Nothing will ever happen to my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, goodness. All right, so talk to me about a squished Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is from Zedmada on Twitter, and he offers a theory about why the Mac mini got squished. I said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the last show that I didn’t like that it got squished. I liked it better when it was taller and skinnier. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his theory is or her theory is that it’s because now it’s if it’s in a one you rack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I kind of buy like before they used to rack them vertically when they were fatter the fat mini was they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just turn them on their sides and I guess they would take up to you at that point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh more than that I think four or five probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t remember what it was like some of it but anyway like the mini the mini is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t it’s not really a rack mountable machine people have rack mounted it because it’s small and it will fit and squishing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it down to one you maybe was a nod to the people racking them. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re going to make something good for racking, you wouldn’t make something like the mini like you would make. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would it would be made differently. Put it that way. I mean, at the very least, it would have little flanges or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so you could actually put it in a mounting thing. So the mini still looks to me like something that’s meant to be on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a desk somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I would agree. And, you know, if they wanted to rack mount a Mac, don’t you think they would have like some serve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or server and it would run? OS 10, but you would have maybe abbreviated as like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey X or something. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right. One more piece of follow-up. This is from an anonymous industry source. That’s how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John closely I’m going to get to identifying this person. And he’s talking about the Dolby CS demo, which I found

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out at the end of the show that neither one of you knew what the hell I was talking about last week. It’s CES

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Dolby showed this experimental, like this is not a product, but let’s just show you what this would look like. It’s experimental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crazy television setup thing. It was demonstrating what I was talking about, you know, in terms of better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels, a much larger range between the darkest and the brightest spot on a television.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you think about when you go outside in the real world, what is the difference in brightness between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a place that’s under direct sunlight and noon and a place that’s, you know, shaded under an umbrella?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s or like if you’re looking up at the sky and the sun is in the corner of your eye, what is the difference in brightness between that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then like the dark thing in the corner? It’s huge, gigantic dynamic range. I don’t know what his numbers was, but it’s way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than is on a TV TV has bright areas and dark areas, but they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much closer together and some of that is practically practically speaking you’re gonna have to limit because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Your television had the same dynamic range as real life and a show Panned the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to a sunny sky and you stared at the TV you would go blind So that’s bad If you had televisions emitting for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the full electromagnetic spectrum of the Sun at the same brightness A, that would take a lot of power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and B, it would not be good for your vision. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re saying there’s a happy medium between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current incredibly small dynamic range of televisions today and the outdoors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so this demo was like, here’s what we can do with current technology if we just, you know, make this crazy experimental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John set, and it looks strikingly different than a regular television. A regular television starts to look like a completely low contrast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pool of mud compared to this greater dynamic range. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this industry that they’re in is the you know, the video entertainment industry and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the source says High dynamic range is two big wins It looks stunning and is in my opinion the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interesting interesting feature added to cinema recently It adds more to the experience than stereo 3d high frame

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rate or 4k Also, since most studio and other content creators have art are already producing 16-bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per channel images with over range values. It’s almost free There’s some stuff that has to be done in post and color grading,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there’s no re-rendering as there is with 3d and 4k I’ve seen the Dolby tech and it’s great for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the home, but I’m not sure how they’re gonna get us get this into theaters Which is where the money is for the studios So the thing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the source is a good point because saying that that most of the content is already created with color values

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That are outside the range that can be displayed by any current output device So all of their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John content is shot with 16 bits of value Per component and scaled down to 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bits or less or whatever the current output devices that we have in our home So they don’t have to reshoot the footage. They don’t have to re-render

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do anything like that They just they already have source material that is outside the ranges that can be displayed So if someone could make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a commercial set that could display a larger dynamic range a lot of the content that we already know of That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been created in the past few years Already has the source material is already sufficient to show that extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dynamic range but again, Dolby was not demonstrating a product that you could buy it was just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of a You know, wouldn’t it be cool if kind of tech demo? So I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that that’s where people concentrate, especially after 4K comes and goes and does its thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The next thing they should be looking at is, I mean, they should be looking at it now, but it seems like 4K is what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna do because it’s easier, but higher dynamic range I’m much more excited about. So I’ll watch for that in 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sounds good. Hey, Marco, you wanna talk about a friend of ours?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love to. It is possibly our best friend. It is Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use offer code marco. Squarespace is constantly improving their platform. They have new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco features, new designs, and even better support all the time. Their designs are beautiful, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco responsive for mobile, and you can customize them in any way you want. You can customize the CSS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can inject JavaScript, or you can use their awesome GUI tools and just edit it without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco touching any code. It’s all up to you. They have over 20 highly customizable templates to choose from and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these templates have won awards and then design awards and then they also have incredible customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco support. Their customer support team works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have also won their own awards. There’s just awards all over Squarespace. They have over 70 employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco devoted to support right here in New York City. So, Squarespace starts at just $8 a month

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that includes a free domain if you sign up for a year. And you can start a free trial today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or any day really, but do it today. You’re remembering now, don’t put it off, just do it today. Start a free trial today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with no credit card required. A real genuine free trial, no weird strings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attached, no credit card required, and start building your website. See if you like it. When you do decide to sign

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up, please use our offer code, Marco, to get 10% off and to show your support for this show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Interestingly enough, this week my wife decided to move her photography site over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Squarespace. You can check it out at TiffanyArment.com. She moved it over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and she is so happy at how easy it was to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Before she was kind of wedging it into Tumblr and Tumblr really is not made to do what she wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do exactly. It was using the wrong tool for the job. Squarespace turns out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the right tool for the job in this case and it oh man it it was so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easier for her to do the photos she wanted embed them the way she wanted and do the layouts and she was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happy like every day she was like she was happy to be working on it and thrilled and so motivated she put up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of new posts huge difference in in productivity and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customizability for what she actually wanted to do with it so she’s very happy with Squarespace so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring once again go to Squarespace comm use offer code Marco for 10% off thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Some pretty big stuff has happened over the last couple of days. We’re recording on Wednesday the 15th.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And on the one hand, I don’t know if there’s really that much more to say about it. But on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the other hand, I know the three of us well enough to know there’s probably some stuff to say. So are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you tearing the thermostats off your wall, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everyone keeps asking me this. Yeah. So the story in case you’ve been living under a rock and somehow listen to podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are that Google has bought Nest, or is about to buy Nest, pending regulatory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco approval, I believe. But Google is probably going to buy Nest for $3.something billion. $3.2? Whatever it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A little over $3 billion. And so I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nest thermostats in my house. They’re okay. My favorite feature of them is the remote-control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone app. I turned off all the learning stuff because it kind of just fought with me all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But imagine that, something that wanted control didn’t get along with me because I wanted control. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big surprise. Alright. So, no I’m not ripping them off the wall yet because first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the reasons I got them is because nothing else really does the remote control aspect while also looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasonably nice in the rooms. So, that’s one problem. One of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the problems though is that, you know, this is still a very new thing, so I’m not going to like rip the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thermostats out of the wall out of some, you know, spite or speculation of what Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash Nest might do in the future. That being said, I wrote a post about it, so I’m not going to go too far into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, but I don’t think it’s wise for anybody to assume that these things are going to magically remain completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco separate. Obviously, if they’re going to remain completely separate, why would Google spend a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money on it? That’s probably not what happened. I think you can look at what Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how Google does acquisitions on this scale. When Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, nowadays acquisitions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a billion dollars are almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco commonplace, but back then they weren’t, at least in the tech business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When they bought YouTube, it was very clear that video was a big thing on the Internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think history has supported that since then. That was a very wise decision.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If they didn’t buy it, Yahoo or Microsoft was probably going to buy it. It’s a very good thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google got it for them, because video is very, very important and represents tons of traffic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and activity on the internet. So they kind of had to do that. When Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bought Instagram, that was also over a billion, wasn’t it? Or was it exactly one billion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? Something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe it was around a billion, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Facebook bought Instagram because they were threatened and freaked out. Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco primary, like, most used application is photo sharing. And there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this huge world of photo sharing happening on this social network that was dominating mobile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it was competing with the thing Facebook uses the most on mobile, where Facebook was still pretty weak

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and did not have a strong foothold. So this was a major threat to Facebook. That’s why Zuck,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, rushed the deal through and, you know, regardless of it being, like, right before their IPO and possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having problems with that, like, he pushed it through because he’s a smart guy he knew this was a threat right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so going back to Google they recently when I’m more recently than YouTube at least they bought Motorola mobility for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was it 12 billion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t even remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think Google wishes it didn’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to so Google buys motor or mobility

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for something like 12 billion and it seemed like the reason they bought it was because they were threatened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and freaked out again just like you know you buying YouTube, they were threatened and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco freaked out. Facebook buying Instagram, they were threatened and freaked out. So Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buying Motorola, they were threatened and freaked out because all this patent stuff was going on around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Android, and Android is very important to them, and the Android market was kind of becoming the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Samsung market, and it was kind of nice to prop somebody else up a little bit, just for diversity’s sake and competition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it was mostly about patents, I think. I think the industry bears that out so far. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looking at that, it didn’t turn out so well. It seems like it was a sloppy move. It seems like it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe not thought through, maybe not enough diligence done on what the value of these patents actually might be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whatever the reason, it seemed like it was kind of a rash decision at the time that caught a lot of people by surprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so far has proven not to have really been worth it. So this brings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us to Nest. What the heck do they want with Nest? There is a good post on our friend Ben Thompson’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco site, Stratechery. Am I saying that right finally? I think it’s Stratechery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a long E. It’s got the little thing on the E.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Every time. I pronounce it in my head, Stratechery, but I believe it’s Stratechery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay. I think you’re right. So anyway, so Ben Thompson at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Stratechery wrote this nice piece, I think yesterday, we’ll link to it in the show notes, about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this might be Google’s new business model they’re getting into that that all of their previous business models have been focused

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on advertising and the the number of people using the internet continuing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to grow tremendously but that apparently we’re starting to reach limits of the world population

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and economic realities such that the number of people using the internet like the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco growth peak of that is going to end in a couple of years if that growth is going to start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slowing down significantly So if Google’s relying on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more and more people just using the internet and looking at their ads every day for all their future business, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of, it’s almost saturated. And you know, it’s not that, it’s not going to start shrinking, it’s not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to stop all growth, but the growth is going to slow down a lot. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his theory is that, you know, getting into devices, getting into hardware, might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be their next new business model arm because advertising might be saturated for them or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco close to it? I don’t know. Because, so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let’s look at what they bought here. They bought a company that is not very old,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sells products, you know, to a good volume, but not like, we’re not talking like an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Samsung kind of volume of products that they’re shipping here, or manufacturing. So, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not buying a huge supply chain. They’re buying some good retail connections, certainly, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not the kind of retail connections that a phone or computer OEM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have, for instance. So I think one of the biggest things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that they’re buying what appears to be a pretty good staff. Having Tony Fadell on the team

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is probably going to be a pretty big win, but they’re saying they’re keeping Nest separate and he’s going to keep running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Nest part of it, So I don’t know, it kind of feels like that’s a lot of money to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have spent on a company that I’m not entirely sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how Google is really going to get that amount of value out of this company. What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So could it be an acquihire?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s way too expensive for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For three billion? How many employees do you think Nest has?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, probably a couple hundred, I don’t know, I’m just guessing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} A couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hundred? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} seems way high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I would I would I would say it’s between 50 and 100 would be my guess based on no facts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re thinking like programmers. No companies companies have way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more staff than a lot than programmers tend to estimate myself included because Once you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco leave the engineering department and you get into like retail sales support manufacturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all that stuff It’s massively people intensive. They probably probably have a couple hundred. I’m guessing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t even do I thought you had to order nest online Are they in retail stores?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, they’re in Best Buy. They had a big long deal with Best Buy. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re in the Apple store, aren’t they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. Like, whatever it is, $3.2 billion is a lot of money for a product that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a luxury product that I don’t think sells in any kind of both of their products are luxury products. Because if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just want a smoke detector or a thermostat, you can get them way cheaper, right? And your house already has a thermostat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Only people with expendable income or tech nerds want to replace something. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to get a smoke detector, people are just going to go to Walmart, get the cheapest smoke detector they can to be up to code, or they’ll just let the take the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery out and never put it back in. Like these are these are luxury items. They have to be low volume. There’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of employees. There’s not a lot of intellectual property there. I would imagine you you’re getting a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John superstar Tony Fidel, Mr. iPod, but like that’s one person you’re not paying 3.2 billion for him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I kind of I think the the penetration of Internet, you know, the growth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John peak thing is a real thing, but I don’t not sure that’s particularly related to the nest acquisition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the easiest explanation for the next acquisition is the obvious one, which is Google. Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loves information. They love you know, that’s that’s what it’s not so much like they love advertising or that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love information. And some people think it’s because they’re evil, and they want to spy on everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, I see it a lot from their perspective as a sort of nerd perspective is like, think of the cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things you could do if we had more information. What if we had had pictures of every street in the United States. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they said, what if we did the inside of buildings like that? You could go right from the street into the inside of buildings and walk around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If they could have live cameras on every street in the United States, they would do that instead of having old pictures and satellite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John footage and stuff like that. What if we could tell where location is? GPS and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones is a great tool. We can tell you’re on your way home from work and what your traffic is like and when you’re going to be there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all that other stuff that you can do. What if we had sensors in your home that could tell what temperature it is, whether you’re home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The temperature outside like you can do cool things with information that what they have is basically a massively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John massively distributed. Computing infrastructure for information what is their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motto like to organize the world information. The temperature of your house is part of that world information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which is a crossword for you to be allowed about it but like that like think of what what nest does nest makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things to gather information from inside people’s homes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I agree with everything you just said that that they they can derive value out of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of the data the connections the installed base of being in people’s houses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I can’t see them getting three billion dollars worth of value out of that from this company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well this company figured out a way to sell people sensors that go in their homes that are connected to the network and thus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John far Google has been bad at that I’m sure Google would love to have more sensors in people’s homes that are connected to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the network and well it’s nest is like Well, we don’t sell a lot of them, and we just sell it to early adopters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for now. But we found a way to sell it. They have enough style and cachet to be interesting to nerdy people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco bought one, right? That’s what was right in their meeting. They said, hey, Marco bought one. I bought four. There you go. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they should write in their slide. And they’re, you know, Google, you should acquire us. Next slide, Marco bought four. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, $3.2 billion. Like, you know, baby steps, right? I don’t, if this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is part of a big initiative, I don’t think it’s because Google wants to start selling, you know, iPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or, you know, consumer hardware, they want to sell things that feed information back into this giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that is Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes. And I, and I think you’re right, but we’re, we’re also not considering that it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than just Tony Fidel. It’s also as per some people who probably don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, like, like the chat and I’m not talking about them, but the chat has been quoting, Oh, uh, the hundred or a hundred and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plus ex Apple employees. And do you think that three billion is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or that a hundred Apple employees that are presumably very good? Plus Tony Fidel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is worth three billion I don’t think so, but maybe maybe there’s more talent there than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to retain that talent like you mean depending on who gets what stock options and what your golden

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handcuffs are and how long you have to stay at the company to get your whatever you’re gonna get like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is a good way to get good employees, but the best employees are always restless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They get the startup, they make the cool thing, they get acquired by the big company, they stay at the big company for two years and they repeat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that process because they just want to move on to new things and don’t want to be a cog in the big machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I don’t know. Of all the companies they could have acquired, Nest is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so outlandish. The price seems outlandish to me, even with the supposedly 200 to 500 employees, it still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like a heck of a lot of money, but, uh, you know, they’re, they’re buying based on what they think the future value

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Google is. That’s, that’s the way the sales work. It’s not how much nest is worth. It’s how much nest is worth to Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think nest, for example, how much would nest be worth to Apple? Is it worth 3.2 billion to get those a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hundred employees back? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. Our nest products work that much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that Apple would turn his nose up the product and say, if we wanted to design a thermostat, we could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have done just as good a job, if not better. And same thing for the smoke detector, but Google cannot say that Google say if we tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to design a thermostat it would be shaped like a sphere and no one would buy it and it would never ship.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, I think it was Ben Thompson who said this in one of his articles, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco correct me if I’m wrong, that Tim Cook always says, keep the company simple, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do a few things well. Apple would never buy it because they, like, Apple doesn’t buy companies that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have existing products in the marketplace that they have to keep supporting. They don’t do that, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not their style. do they buy logic and then stop making it for anything except for the Mac right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s I always wanted to buy Intel and say and we’re not selling chips anyone else anymore sorry guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would be amazing it would have been amazing like four years ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AMD would just aim AMD would just take all that business I guess but like that would yeah that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make everyone hate Apple that would also like if Apple really cared about personal computer market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share it would buy Intel and stop selling their chips anyone else yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco honestly what that would hurt the most would be the server world. Because on PCs, who cares? People will use whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the heck is cheap, and they don’t care, and the PC market is dying anyway. But in the server world, Intel has a massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lead over everybody else, and that would suck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple would never do that because Intel would be super expensive, and Apple shareholders would punish it severely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for buying a super expensive company and then cutting off almost all of its income.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I have to imagine, too, the Department of Justice would possibly have a problem with that move.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if they would, because Intel as the big dog in the chip space, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of people who fab arm chips, and there’s AMD sitting over there going, hey, we sell chips that go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on servers too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That nobody wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, because Intel ones are always slightly better. Oh, it’s more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slightly, that’s the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s not night and day, like, they’re in the fight. I mean, hey, what are all the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John consoles? AMD got that contract.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, because that was about price. In servers, it’s about performance per watt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know. I always wonder why Intel didn’t compete harder for the game. Because surely Intel could have gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the game console thing if it wanted it. But it was like, we don’t want that. But let AMD have it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s probably because, correct me if I’m wrong, aren’t all of these game console CPUs not x86? No, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco x86.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s AMD x86 chips. I mean, AMD has particular assets that make it good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it can put, you know, it has the, I forget what their interconnect bus is. It used to be hyper transport, but whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is. AMD is good at making integrated single chip solutions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is what the game consoles needed. So I think they were better tailored to that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the margins have to be way, way low on the game consoles. So why would Intel bend over backward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make its custom tailored single chip solution for game consoles, and their reward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is super low margins? I mean, just compare it to the margins they’re getting on the CPUs that they’re selling less and less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, but they sell into the server space. Those margins are much nicer. So I don’t know. Intel has a problem in terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what their future business is going to be like, but they didn’t go for the game consoles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe it would’ve been good for them to give them an outing. But anyway, I was reacting to something in the chat room that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was saying, what would be the equivalent purchase for Apple? Google buys Nest, what does Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Beats me. I wish a few years ago they would have bought Twitter, because I think that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have given them not only a massive foothold in a very important area called social

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco networks, you might have heard something in the last few years, but it also would have given them a massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco staff that knows how to run major web services.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think they tried, right? Well, I mean, they might have tried years ago, but it’s just, it’s not their style to buy large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco established companies that are not directly related to what they’re doing. You know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t see them really doing something like this. That’s the problem is like, there is no Apple equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this because they wouldn’t do something like this in all likelihood.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But Apple likes to have their cake and eat it too. They want other companies, they need other companies help, but they want the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other companies to assume all the risk. And they want a bunch of other companies to compete for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honor of assuming all of their risk for them. So they will pay billions of dollars for some company to buy equipment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to build their stuff. But it’s like, after you finish making all those widgets for us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next widget might go to a different factory and we say goodbye to you. You’re not our problem anymore. We don’t have to worry about your employees.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to make money in the future. It’s like totally, they’re in a power position.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that we have lucrative contracts to build things. Everybody wants our contracts. Why would we ever buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a chip manufacturer with a fab or whatever? I mean, the fabs is the one thing that’s different than the other stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because there are only a few fabs in the world. Fabs are so insanely expensive, and Intel has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best one. And Apple seems to be saying, we can make our own chips. We give them little names with A’s and letters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like Audi. And they’re cool, and we design them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we pay someone else to fab them, but whatever. But they fancy themselves like we control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our own destiny because we have an ARM license and we pay someone to fab them. And now we’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beholden to Intel for our chips, which is true. You know, you don’t have to worry about paying Intel for these big margins. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re now at the mercy of three possible fabs, one of which is Intel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, ARM, which I assume will continue licensing its things far and wide. Or we don’t need ARM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll just make our own architecture. It would be fine. But those fabs, like, I guess it would be collusion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they all got together said that we’re going to crank up the prices for Apple, but they’re not really in control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of their own destiny. I mean, for crying out loud, Samsung is fabbing so much of their stuff still.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That should tell them something. So I would actually encourage Apple to consider buying Intel sometime

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the future when they’re weaker and smaller. Intel, that is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you don’t think they would want Dropbox? I don’t think they would. But I’m thinking, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are Apple’s big weaknesses at the moment. And I think relying on other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fabs is a great example. And as we’ve whined about ad nauseam on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show, and just about every other podcast that covers Apple, you know, cloud services are an issue. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and who is really, really good at cloud services. Twitter has gotten there. Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is but too late. Tumblr is but too late. You know, so what’s left and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and since Steve flirted with the idea of Dropbox, if memory serves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, they wanted to buy Dropbox, totally. But if any of those stories are to be believed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, I didn’t see Apple people categorically denying them or anything like that. They wanted to buy Dropbox. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same thing with the Twitter thing. I don’t think we have any concrete evidence that they wanted to buy Twitter, but it’s assumed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t read the Twitter book, so maybe that’s in there. And Dropbox, as soon as Steve Jobs visits your company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tells you your product is crap, that means Apple wants to buy you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah. Well, and you know, people always talk about that incident with Dropbox and, oh, Apple should have bought them and I wish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple bought Dropbox. Trust me, you don’t wish for that if you like Dropbox at all. Because if Apple bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dropbox, it probably would have been for the talent and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of the algorithms or sync techniques, maybe, but mostly for the talent and they probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have shut down the product or ruined it. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agreed. Yeah. And not having a fab is not a weakness of Apple. Again, I think Apple’s in a strength position,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like we don’t need to assume all this risk of having these big expensive things. Other people will assume all the risk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we’ll get all the benefit as long as we manage these relationships. But it’s a minor difficulty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the uncomfortable situation of relying so heavily on one of your biggest competitors that just it’s like, well, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just kind of happened. But by the same token, like that’s billions of dollars changing hands. And it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of weird that you’re paying Samsung. But on the other hand, Samsung is not going to be say we refuse your billions of dollars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like no, they’re going to keep taking your billion dollars as long as you So Apple is trying to transition away, but it’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh no, we’re in a weak position because at any moment Samsung can refuse our billions of dollars to fab our chips. Samsung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is going to keep taking that money as long as you keep offering it. It’s just that like I keep looking at Intel because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is a strategic event. Like Intel is sitting there off to the side with an architecture that nobody wants for mobile,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the best fabs in the world. And I’m not sure what their plan is, but if I was at any of these companies, Samsung,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google, Apple, it’d be like, you know, we could have an easy 10, 15, you know, perhaps larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John percent advantage over all of our competitors. Uh, if we could just fab it at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a smaller process size than they could sooner than they could. Uh, and that would, and it’s not something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can, you know, if you, if you get Intel’s fabs, what is your, what is your competitors recourse?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They can’t like catch up to you. They can’t like whip, uh, TSMC harder,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say work harder. They’re at 14 nanometers. Come on, you guys got to do better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s what Taiwan Semiconductor has been doing for its entire life, is trying to get better. And they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting better, but for now, Intel has the lead. So I keep looking at them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and a few people pointed out when we last brought this up, and when a bunch of people, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our friend Ben Thompson, were talking about this, one of the problems is that supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people who are smarter than me at this stuff figured out that Intel actually doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to fab things for Apple. To fab things for iOS, rather, specifically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s a soft lie. Did you just see that story that Intel closed a brand new fab in Arizona

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before even opening it, before even starting to fab chips on it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} missed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. There was a multi-billion dollar fab. They built the building and everything. They just didn’t buy the fab,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the super expensive fab equipment that’s like two-thirds of the cost of the entire center. But instead of buying that equipment and installing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, they’re just saying, just leave that aside for now because they were going to fab their 14 nanometer stuff there. Instead they said they’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fab their 14 nanometer stuff and their existing fabs. The reason it’s speculated they’re doing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is because they don’t have enough customers to warrant opening an entire new fab. So it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you buy it, they will build. I don’t know how I’m mangling that thing. If Apple suddenly said, hey, Intel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we want you to fab all of our stuff, suddenly they would say, great. Well, we have all this excess capacity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we’re currently not using. We’ll buy that fabbing equipment. We’ll install it in that building. We’ll start building more. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a problem Intel is happy to have. But right now, it looks like they have the opposite problem, they were building

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the expectation that the growth would continue on the current trend, but like the dip in the PC market and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the prominence of mobiles making it so well, we set out to many, many years ago, we set out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to build this giant fab in Arizona and it looks like we’re not even going to need it. So just keep it on pause there. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll need it later. I think Intel would love to, to fulfill Apple’s needs with its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by greatly increasing its capacity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you think Intel will eat crow anytime soon? Do you think it will stop being so proud and allow themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have Apple bully them into a deal? Because you know Apple, to your point earlier, won’t go into a deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unless it’s extremely lucrative for Apple as well, or perhaps maybe if it totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screws Samsung. So do you think that Apple would get, I don’t know if desperate is the right word,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but punchy enough to give Samsung the middle finger and simultaneously Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will get desperate enough to take on Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s the only thing you could scare Apple with would be like, well, Apple, I know we’ve been going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back and forth and we keep saying you got to take x86 and you keep saying just fab our A8 chip as is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ARM and we can never come to agreement. But you know, Samsung is over here and they’re talking to us and they want us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get, like the only way you could try to make them jealous is like, look, if you don’t do it, Samsung is going to, and you know Samsung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is stupid and makes dumb deals and they’ll get our fabs and you won’t. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not stupid, they’re shameless. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} a big difference. They are quite smart. It’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t see that. I think we’re at an impasse until someone’s power position changes drastically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until Intel gets way weaker, until Apple gets way stronger, until Samsung gets way stronger. In the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current scenario, I think in any negotiation between these three companies, between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any pairs of these three companies, we’re kind of at the status quo. There’s no reason that Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should bend over backwards and save Apple’s deals now. And there’s no reason that Apple should bend over backwards and say, oh, Intel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need you so badly. they don’t. Like nobody needs anybody that badly to make a dumb deal at this point. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing happens, right? But just look how long it took to get Intel into Macs. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a long time, the writing was on the wall that Apple was in the weak position, Apple desperately needed a CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solution, Intel was willing to offer it. And even that took forever to come to pass. So I think we’re far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from that kind of power imbalance here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s fair. Anything else about Nesta?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What do you guys think about the privacy paranoia stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, before we get to that, let’s do the second thing we liked this week. It is our friends at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Transporter. So Transporter, we’ve talked about Transporter a lot before to review,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then I have some new stuff. But to review, Transporter is this cool product which is basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it works in software like Dropbox, but it’s a hardware external drive enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you own and control. So you buy this enclosure or their new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product called Transporter Sync which just has a USB port and you plug in any external hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you already have. So you buy this enclosure or this adapter for your existing enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your hard drive becomes a cloud storage drive. And it’s private

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s secure, everything’s encrypted back and forth over the internet. So you can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this thing in your house and you can have another one in somebody else’s house or your office and you can have certain folders

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the whole things sync to each other. You can install software on your computer or any of your computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or even on your iPhone or Android devices and iOS Android devices excuse me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can access everything over the internet from that hard drive that’s sitting in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your house and all these folders all these files are not stored in the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are stored only on that drive or or whatever computers are syncing to it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything is private, it’s secure, it’s easier for certain regulatory compliances, it’s easier for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco personal privacy, and for if your principles or standards are such that you don’t want to store your stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on cloud drives, if you’re worried about security or the NSA. It’s really this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very nice product for this kind of hard to explain thing, but trust me, it’s awesome. Just think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it like Dropbox, where you own the hard drive that everything’s stored on. and they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this awesome software you install it, it’s called Connected Desktop. They have a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feature in version 2.4. And now you can select to automatically sync

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your special user folders on Mac OS X. You can say like, sync the desktop, documents, downloads,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco movies, pictures, music, like you know, all these like special media or destination folders. You can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those sync with folders on your transporter automatically and sync between any computers you have connected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the transporter. So think about the possible uses of that. I mean, that’s incredible. You can have all your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photos synced from your photos directory, no special directories, not in this Dropbox folder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or anything, not on a network share. You can have everything synced locally. That’s really powerful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can also upload photos directly from your iOS device to your transporter with their iPhone and iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. Really great stuff going on. They’re doing a lot of improvements to the software.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re adding new capabilities all the time to these things. And best of all, their prices were already pretty good. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now they’ve cut their prices for the transporters that have hard drives in them by $50. So now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the two terabyte transporter model is just $349. A one terabyte transporter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just $249. 500 gigs, just $199. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can get the transporter sync, it’s like a little disc almost. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s the one you can plug in your own hard drive. And that’s just $99. So it’s a really, really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deal here. and there’s no monthly fees. Any kind of cloud service, you’re gonna pay monthly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fees. With Transporter, you own the drive. You just buy it up front and then that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. There’s no monthly fee to access things, even the syncing procedure that happens over the internet, there’s no fee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that. It’s just yours, you just own it. So really great. Go to filetransporter.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP. You can watch, they have a sandwich video, which we love, we love our friend Adam’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sandwich. So you can go watch the sandwich video at filetransporter.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ATP. And besides those already low prices that I just told you about, you can save

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco another 10% off by buying transporters at the company store. Go to filetransporterstore.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use discount code ATP, and you can save another 10%. So thanks a lot to FileTransporter for sponsoring our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show once again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So John, you had just asked about privacy. Do you care to restate the question, sir?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, it’s mostly to Marco because he’s the most anti-Google amongst

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us. A lot of people are freaking out over privacy concerns that not only are their Nest devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to start spying on them, but now Nest, previously the company that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loved and trusted is going to start making new products that come pre-installed with Google’s evil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’ll spy on you and steal your skull and do whatever they do. You said you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to get rid of your Nest things, but how do you feel about the… if we asked you, how do you feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the company Nest? You’d be like, yeah, they’re all right, whatever. And now it’s like, oh no, Google has them, now they’re evil.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would certainly hesitate before ever buying another one. That’s for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I think, you know, I’m not going to rip the curtains off the wall. I mean, I don’t hate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google. I’m kind of just maybe a skeptic or maybe a cynic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but certainly a skeptic. And by that I mean, you And I don’t mean that I look at everything and try to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the worst possible interpretation. I just try… I look at things and I try to cut through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the corporate speak and the, you know, hey, we’re all friends here, kind of patronization…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Patronization? Patronization?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Anyway… Either way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Try to cut through all that. Because corporate communication is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just infected with bloat and euphemism and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco diversions. this crap to candy-coat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad news or to hide things that they don’t really want you to think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or that are inconvenient for you to think about. We used to think that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tech industry was different and real, and now the tech industry is big enough that that’s not the case. The tech

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco industry has just as much corporate crap in all of its communication as everybody else does. So I try to cut through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all that and look at things realistically, because history has proven that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of these nice candy-coated statements from the big tech companies, there’s usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a real truth there that’s less pretty if you think about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And again, history has proven that that is usually the case. Once you see what companies say versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what happens, and what happens next, and what happens two years later, I think I’m not being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unreasonable with a lot of this stuff. I’m not saying I’m always right, that everyone always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turns evil or anything, but I think history has shown that there’s good reason to be skeptical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of what companies tell you, and there’s good reason to try to cut through some of this crap that tries to candy coat and spin things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I look at what they’re doing here and I say, well, obviously they say now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you don’t have to worry, we’re keeping these companies as separate units, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nest data will only be used for improved Nest products and services. But obviously that doesn’t really mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything because they can always change that, because privacy policies can always be changed. So they can always change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. And the definition of what exactly a Nest product and service is can be so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco broad once they’re owned by Google, then, you know, it doesn’t really matter. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re concerned about Nest data being used by Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then that’s a valid concern. I don’t think you can trust anything that they say to the contrary that you shouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco concerned about that. I think if you don’t want Google knowing stuff that your nest can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco find out or can infer, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s a valid concern and their statements have not done anything to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really alleviate that to any critical eye. That being said, me personally, I don’t care that strongly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about it. If I cared so strongly, I would block Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my hosts file and just not ever use any of their services and block all of their embeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everywhere and just be fine with that. I don’t care that strongly about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I try to keep a somewhat healthy distance from Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I still use their stuff when it’s the best tool for the job for what I’m doing. And so I still use search,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still use maps, and probably some other stuff I’m not even aware of. I still use analytics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on my site, even though I hate it, I still use it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I don’t care that strongly about it. And I think caring so strongly to try to avoid one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company, like bending over backwards to avoid one company is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually just hurting yourself. And it’s like when people have a bad experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flying somewhere and then like oh I’m never gonna fly you know Delta or whatever again they’re out of airlines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at five years exactly exactly they all suck exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} and so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s how this stuff is like that every tech giant Apple included does stuff that I don’t like and that offends me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so you just kind of have to you have to look at pragmatism and say well okay you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I could go go full Stallman or I could be useful and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s you know I I choose to have things be a little bit easier, and everybody makes the same trade-off. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these ad-supported, creepy services are able to exist and thrive so well, because everybody’s making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that same trade-off. People say, I don’t wanna pay for email hosting. Fine, I’ll go to Gmail. It’s good enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or it’s the best in their opinion, and that’s fine with them. So, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has a line where they draw to say, well, I will tolerate X amount of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ad slash creepiness slash cost to me. I will tolerate that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in exchange for the service or product that I want to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not saying that you should necessarily move that line in where you draw it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just think it’s worth knowing what you’re getting into and looking at things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco critically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I’m probably the biggest Google fan amongst us. At least I use more of their products. I use Gmail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as my mail. I use their calendar. I use analytics. I use their search.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I even use Google Plus sometimes. And of course YouTube and everything. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think where a lot of the commentary on Google Nest and Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John privacy concerns from you Marco, but also from other people goes wrong is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not so much in what’s going to happen, but why.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the thing about, so obviously Nest and Google stuff is going to be integrated and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna share data and anything Nest does by definition is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to improve Nest products, so that’s a meaningless statement and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, Google and Nest are gonna be connected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google’s gonna connect up all that information to, all the way through all of its other products because that’s what Google does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think a lot of those things could be cool, could enhance Google’s products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could enhance Nest, it will make Nest better, it will make your Android phone better, it will make Google search better, it will make Maps better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will make driving directions better, Like everything, it’s, there’s a lot of synergy as they say in the business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between this, because, you know, Hey, sensors, more sensors and more data makes more intelligent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decisions. Uh, and that’s all good. And so I, and I think that’s mostly how Google sees it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who work there are like thinking, you know, sci-fi, like what can we do if we had all this information and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always wanted sensors and stuff in the home and, you know, things smart, smart homes and all this other crap. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, you know, Google sees a way to make that happen. So that’s, we know that’s going to happen. right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the next thing is like, okay, well, once that happens, this is all happening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of within one company, you know, Google, even though it’s Google Nest or whatever. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is all happening, like there’s some centralization of power, Google was already so powerful, because it had search and everything. And now just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more and more information is accumulating into Google, which is why people get pissed off at Google plus integrating with YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comments and everything. It’s like they want to think of it as silos, even though it’s totally not behind the scenes. And once it becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clear to them, this is all going to one place, they think, oh my God, this one company knows so much about me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If I think, what does Google know about me? They know everything about me. You know, you’re worried about like the NSA having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John metadata on your phone calls and everything. If you use all of Google services, they have way more information than the NSA. Now obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s different because the NSA is taking it unwillingly and they’re the government and I’m not saying this is their equivalent, but I’m just saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a lot of information about you in Google. And here’s where I think it goes wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The danger of Google having all this information is not that Google is going to do terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things with it. The danger of Google having all this information is that Google will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do something stupid or people will hack them. Although get them, I mean, just look at the target thing of getting all information, all this credit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John card information, our target, whatever, any giant pool of information about people as a target. And the more centralized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that pool is in, the more valuable the information is, and the more of it there is, the more it’s a target. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think Google is going to get all this information and be evil with it. Although depending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your definition of evil, that that may have already happened. I think what the danger is, all this information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is gathering into this big funnel into Google, and Google will allow that information to leak

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out into the world accidentally. People will get it from them, it will leak out unintentionally, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the nature of the thing. Like, if you, if you, we’ve been putting credit cards into these giant databases for years, and we just kept doing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and kept doing that until finally, you know, there’s like a little chink in the dam and some credit cards get stolen or whatever, eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to be, look, every credit card ever issued has now been stolen. That’s going to happen eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because this information is in too many places. It’s all over the place. And I think where people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go wrong with their criticism, they’re like, Google is mean and evil and they’re doing this because they’re evil. No, it’s incompetence

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is they’re doing it because they are well-intentioned and they want to make cool products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then that information will get out because it’s impossible for it not to get out and then we’re all screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think the thing that that people find alarming is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Google is getting demonstrably better over time at figuring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you out and getting a more complete picture of who you are in what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do. Um, for example, at work, I was sitting there, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was two or three months ago, and somebody started like kind of spazzing out at their computer and they were kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey muttering to themselves. Whoa, whoa, what, huh? And then the same, almost exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same thing happened just a week or two ago. And what was going on was when that person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of my coworkers went to Google.com, it had like, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see it myself, but it had like confetti or something and it said, happy birthday, you know, John Smith,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it knew that that day was that person’s birthday because they were signed into Gmail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever the case may be. And so on the Google homepage, it said, hey, happy birthday, John. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they found to be very creepy, not necessarily because wishing you a happy birthday is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bad, but it was taking information that, yes, they willingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey provided to Google, but to maybe Gmail, for example, and using it on Google.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And just like you said, John, it’s not really siloed, but it sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of feels siloed to a normal person and to myself included. I use Gmail and I use Google Calendar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if I go so far as to say I use these services begrudgingly, but I’m getting more – I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey giving it harder and harder side-eye with each passing year. I think that again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the real problem is that Google is getting a more complete picture of who we are. To think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we’re – that they’re getting a more complete picture of who we are even at home when we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are most unreserved is creepy. Now to argue with myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a moment, a friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, had a couple really

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} love when you do that. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know. His friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, had a couple really good tweets earlier today that I’m going to read real quick. He said, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we should keep our pants on. I don’t particularly care for Google’s policies, but fearing your thermostat spying on you is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nuts. He then he went on to say, I’m more upset about what seemed to be a cool, innovative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey company leaving the market and I left Gmail months ago. And I think that that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a nice way of saying we all need to relax and this may not be so bad. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s both right and wrong. I don’t think it’s going to be bad soon. I don’t think it may not be bad at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all. But the thing that creeps me out is when I was in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey college, I was just graduating from Virginia Tech in 2004. And this was right around the time that Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Gmail came out. And I remember coveting a Gmail invite like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nobody’s business. Oh, my goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They were for sale on eBay for like $100. dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly. And so I wanted one so, so badly. And, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I eventually had a friend at school that, that got one and he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gave me an invite. And oh my god, I was so excited because Google doesn’t do evil. It says it in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friggin motto, they don’t do evil. And I was so excited to have a gmail invite, I could get away. Well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey knew I was going to have to leave my my Virginia Tech email address. And I didn’t want to have to go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to like hotmail from when I was 10 and so oh man I was so excited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be on gmail fast forward from 2004 to 2014 a decade later

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and every time Google does something I end up giving it harder and harder side I and I look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it again be like mmm that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you had you’re doing the same thing though they got your friend who was freaked out about the birthday thing and you are both misattributing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your discomfort to Google Google does not have your your personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information does not have any value to Google in the way that you mean. Like now they know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you’re cheating on your wife and they have this information and they’re going to blackmail you with it. That information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is useless to Google unless they can sell you like, you know, what is that, AshleyMadison.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever that website is that you, you know, like it’s, there is no, there is no person there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John salaciously trolling through the details of information. But the discomfort you feel is founded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s founded in not that Google is going to do evil things with your thing is that once Google has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that information, everybody else who would want that information knows exactly where to get it. They go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google. If you want to find out what’s going on in someone’s life, well guess what? I know where there’s enough information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Think of a politician who uses Google services. I bet their competitor in a close race would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love to get every bit of information Google has about them. Google’s not going to use that information. It is not in Google’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best interest, probably, to sway the outcome of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John political races or Maybe politics is a bad choice because it actually probably would be in Google’s interest But I’m thinking of just like more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mundane things of like I know you know That you didn’t go to school today because I tracked where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your GPS was on your Android phone Because your check-ins and I’m gonna tell your parents that you didn’t go to school Google is not gonna do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is really dumb to do evil things with that information But once Google has that information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch once that information is in one place Everybody else who wants to do bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things to you the mundane, you know, you’re random jerky guy down the block or a bunch of hackers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who want to get it and sell it to people who want to use it or whatever. That’s the problem. So when people, when you’re giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google your hard side eye, it’s not that you shouldn’t be afraid that Google is going to do evil stuff because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would be incredibly stupid for Google to do evil stuff to you. It would not be in their interest.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you do know that they have this information and you do know that there’s someone out there who could want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and now they know where to get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah and I think you’re right but it’s not necessarily about Google doing evil

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s about mundane things that you think should fly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey under everyone’s radar don’t anymore. Let me give you a concrete example. A friend of mine at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey work, my buddy George, he said to me, oh, you know, I was looking up how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it would be to pay off the rest of the loan on my car. He said, I did this on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Saturday or something like that. Well, get this, Casey. He says, come Monday, I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a call from my dealer that I bought the car from saying, Hey, man, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you ever think about coming in and upgrading your car?” There was something else he had said to me and I don’t recall what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was, but it was a couple – like maybe he got an email from someone else that wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like get him into a new BMW. He has a BMW now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was very creepy that him doing nothing but looking at how much it would cost to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey finish his loan, presumably – I mean we don’t know this for sure, but presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey led to some dealer calling him and saying, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you want to get into a new BMW? I bet we can make that happen. And so the point I’m driving at is this was a very mundane

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing that he didn’t think would make any difference. And suddenly he’s now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey getting heckled from a dealer because of it. And I think Google having a more complete picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of who each one of us is could lead to things like that. And another example is. TaiTai

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the chat earlier said, and I read the same article, but I forget the details that Target

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had started emailing some woman’s – some young lady’s dad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because they like shared a credit card or something like that, like, hey, we think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you might like the following things. And the things were all things for new moms. So Target

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had deduced based on the purchases that the young woman made that she was probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pregnant and would probably need the following things. And so her dad found out that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey his daughter was – that the daughter was pregnant by way of Target saying, hey, we think you might want the following.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s just weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that’s like – that was old world tech. We were even tracking purchases on credit cards for decades and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t need too much information to do that. But what I’m thinking about is where – how do you make this system work? Because in some respect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s inevitable that there’s going to be more information about all of us out there and it’s going to be more interconnected. And that’s just the bottom line. Like there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turning back on that because the usefulness of it is too great. It outweighs – it’s the same thing with credit cards. you pay for everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with cash, nobody knew what you bought. But credit cards are way too convenient. We were willing to live with the fact that the credit card company knows everything we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy. We made that decision decades ago. Everyone’s OK with it. The fallout of it is sometimes Target

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sends you a thing for baby toys, and your dad finds out you’re pregnant. I think that’s the trade-off we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made, right? But as the volume of information goes up, I think our laws need to keep up with it. And I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we’re missing here in these laws, and again, setting aside the NSA for now, because that’s extra legal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They are the law, like Judge Dredd. But what we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John missing here is like, I think there’s no turning back the tide. There’s no going full

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Stallman and saying you can’t collect this information or whatever, or trying to do some sort of like informational

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anti-trust like monopoly thing. Like, oh, no one company can have x amount of information about you. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even think that’s going to work. What you have to do is say, look, we know you’re going to collect all the information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s illegal to do x, y, and z with that information. How about, you know, it’s illegal to look at that information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, it would have to be like privately encrypted. It’s illegal for you to sell that information of it. Like right now, once Google has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that information of yours, there are very few limits on what they can do with it, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what should it should be like, you know, you can collect all this information, but understand that you’re collecting it for my benefit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I can know how long my commute is going to take. So my phone can tell me that my wife is running late and just went to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store like, but if that you can’t certainly you can’t give that information to anyone else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if we find out someone in your company is looking at that information, it’s a felony, and they go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to jail, there is a gap in the law, because the laws don’t expect any one company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know that much about one person. And right now the law is like, hey, you totally clicked agree, you totally signed up, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gave them that information. Google owns that information. You don’t own that information. That’s not part of your life. And that’s the gap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we have that needs to be addressed, because there’s no way you’re going to stop them from collecting it. And I think we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all want them to collect it. We just want to know that that information is being collected on our behalf. And there are strict limits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on what they can do with that information. And if you violate those limits, bad thing happens to individuals,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to companies. I don’t know what chances there will ever get laws like that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s what needs to happen, because the other things are just not going to happen. We’re not going to stop them from collecting it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, we have one more sponsor this week. It is our friends at Ting. Ting is mobile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that makes sense. They are a no BS, simple to use mobile service provider from the people at 2Cows,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the company behind Hover. Ting is a reseller of the Sprint Network in the US. You can go to their special

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco URL, atp.ting.com. Ting has great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rates, there’s no contracts, no early termination fees. You buy your device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up front and you own it outright from the start. They have a true pay for what you use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pricing model. There’s a base price of $6 per month per device, and then above that, you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pay for whatever amount of minutes or data or messages that you actually use. Whether that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco zero, in which case you pay nothing, or whether it’s bucketed by different amounts. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have different usage this month than last month, no problem. They’ll automatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bill you for whatever you used, whatever bin you fit into, whatever the cheapest bin is that you fit into, they’ll bill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you for that. Very smart, no BS, very simple. It’s a great deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can even see how much you’re going to save with Ting by going to atp.ting.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and checking out their savings calculator. You can enter in your last few bills from your carrier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can even have them scrape your Verizon account if you want to give them your Verizon credentials. It’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they’ll even, let’s say you have an early termination fee. So you’re like, well, I don’t want to break my contract. I’ll have to pay this fee.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, to help make that easier for you, Ting will even give you 25% of it, up to $75 in Ting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco credit if you have to pay a fee like that. And like Hover, Ting also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has fantastic customer support with a no-hold, no-wait phone number. You just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco call this number and a human being picks up the phone. You’re not put on hold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You don’t have to wait in some long queue. You call a number, a human being picks up a phone who is ready and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to help you. There’s no transfers, different departments, having to tell people the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing 10 different times, nothing like that. fantastic telephone support. Plus, of course,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the online support options you can wish for in case you don’t like calling people in this ad about calling people. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can add as many devices to your account as you’d like. You can get pooled billing, pooled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usage between them. It’s actually really nice if you have to manage a fleet of devices, for instance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So really great service here. I’ve said in the past you can use this for, let’s say you’re a developer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want an Android test phone, this is fantastic. Let’s say you You want to just lower your monthly bill and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you use enough data or minutes in such a way that you’re kind of getting ripped off by anybody else’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plans, which is pretty likely. Great for all that. They also include tethering, no additional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco charge. You just use the megabytes that you’re buying, no additional charge. So you can use it as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tethering device, really fantastic. So you can buy a new or used device from Ting. You can bring your own compatible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sprint device if you’d like to. You can even bring a Sprint iPhone 4 or 4S if you’d like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So go check it out. of options, great provider here, go to atp.ting.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking about laws that protect privacy of information held by private companies. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that should have occurred to me, because it’s related to my work, is HIPAA, which is the existing law for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John protecting your health information. And that’s a case where the information was sensitive enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there was the political capital to make laws to address this. Because, OK, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your doctors have this information about your health, and most people feel that that’s so sensitive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that like, okay, I’m giving you this information about health, but you just can’t give it to anyone you want. You don’t own the information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about about my health. You can’t tell my boss that I have some incurable disease or you know, or even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even my wife for that matter, like this, that information is private. And so there are laws saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what what people who deal with health information can and can’t do with it. Now, those laws, I think, are still too lax.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I say this working for a healthcare company in terms of like what the punishments are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if you, first of all, people who sort of work with healthcare information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they have a business-related reason to see it, it’s okay for them to see it, you know, as part of their work,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, working on information systems, deal with it, I mean, how otherwise how could they deal with it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if you see information that you’re not supposed to, or there technically isn’t a work-related reason, the penalties

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the company and the individual are probably not as severe as they should be, especially at the company level, like where they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do fines and the fine values were set sometime when the law was made and it’s like, that’s like, you know, seven hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of revenue for our company. Who cares? It’s not a big deal. Like you don’t want it to be like the cost of doing business. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any kind of law that’s protecting information like this, does Google have a healthcare information? Well, I think they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably had some healthcare initiative like every other company has at some point, but for the most part, no, they don’t have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wasn’t that part of the island plan that all your health information would be open source

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every company has done that. It was some kind of weird thing. Every company has done something involving health care,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fictional and real. But if you look at a certain point, I think the accumulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of information that Google has about you will be more of a privacy concern

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than information protected by HIPAA, especially for most people who don’t have that much health.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But Google would know where you are every second of the day, what you’re doing, what your comings and goings are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what your searches are, what every email to and from you said, what your text messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, or IMs, they will know, put it this way, getting back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the evil political opponent, if you were given two choices, you can have complete access to your political opponent’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John healthcare records, or you can have complete access to everything Google knows about them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you were a betting man, you would say, I’ll take the Google information, please. Because unless there’s some health information, like he has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terminal disease or something, your only real chance like don’t elect him he’s gonna die soon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the Google information boy you know especially if it’s ongoing give me the Google information feed on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my opponent that’s super valuable so this the laws the government Google can do for the information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we give them should already be stronger than than HIPAA and HIPAA I think it could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stronger still so we’re far from that but what else is now welcome to America

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one thing that gives me hope is here I’m gonna put this link in the notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s it’s an article on the VIRG by Nilay Patel who hates me but I like him

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s about he posted a couple days or yesterday about you know called why is everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disappointed by Google buying Nest and at the end he says Google like people are becoming skeptical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Google’s motives and and becoming a little afraid of here afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of an unchecked Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s the date on this lake because I’m pretty sure we We all had this conversation like three years ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about, hey, people are becoming skeptical. I swear on an actual podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe exactly three years ago, I remember being on a podcast where we were talking about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the tide had turned. Maybe it was like Google thinking of buying Twitter or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was the talking point. It’s like, hey, remember when we used to be excited when Google would buy somebody and nowadays

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are excited when our favorite startup would get bought? And nowadays, when Google buys somebody, we’re like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, that’s the end of that. And now they’re going to be evil. Like this, this, I think you could, you could keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rerunning this story every year, every time they buy something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’ve, I’ve felt a shift in this myself, just anecdotally, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been skeptical of Google and, and expressing fear of an unchecked Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, I think a few years longer than most people have in the tech writing world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I kind of felt like I was being my own crazy paranoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco self out in the middle of the woods. You know, like… You are. I am. That’s true. But it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco felt like I was the only one who felt this way, who wasn’t that excited whenever Google would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roll out some new feature that would crush a whole industry. And I was never all in on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s maybe it was the Dejan News. I think maybe that was the thing I’m thinking. Remember when they bought Dejan News?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. You remember what Dejan News was? Nope. No, that’s what I’m saying. It’s way back in time. Dejan News was the thing that had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the Usenet posts. Oh, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how they got it all? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that became Google Groups. And Dejan News was like, oh, Dejan News is great. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can find stuff in you because Usenet was terrible to use, like the native way. And so you would use Dejan News. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then Google bought them. Everyone’s like, oh, that’s too bad. And that, like, I don’t know what date that is. Someone in the chatroom Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up, but that was a long time ago. And that was, I think, the first time that conversation came up of like, we all love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google. We all love Deja News. Why aren’t we happy when Google buys Deja News? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google Groups is why, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What gives me hope is that this is no longer an isolated opinion. This is no longer a minority opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was. Even back then, it was. Even a year ago, it was. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though, people are starting to get a little bit creeped out by Google, And I think that’s the best for everybody, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google, that people are finally getting a little bit skeptical, a little bit like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe we should put a little more critical thought into this before we go celebrate and throw all of our data in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. And that’s just that’s very good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s spreading wider, right? Like, the nerds have always been concerned. And by the way, the chat room says it was 2001

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when Google bought data news, but now it’s spreading wider. I think the Verge is still a tech nerd site. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is like, I’m not I don’t guess I don’t read enough of like the New York Times and stuff to know. Is it coming over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that point? But I think now if you asked, if you ask the average person, how do you feel about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google acquiring company? They’re going to say, I don’t know what nest is. Explain it to me. If they think about it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little while, it’ll probably occur to them. You know, Google is getting a lot of information about us. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, it’s just been slowly ramping up. Maybe once we get that mainstream kind of acceptance, where you can take a microphone to anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the street and say, hey, Google is thinking of buying X. What do you think about that? And they groan. Then that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. that they will have made complete penetration. So I think it’s escalating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I guess you measure it in our nerdosphere by the number and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume of, in terms of loudness, of posts whenever Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buys somebody. And so maybe this time, there’s even more articles, and they’re even more strident

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and angry about it. But I’m not quite sure it’s crossover to USA Today yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe USA Today will run a story about this. But will the tone of the USA Today story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be, look at all this extra information Google’s getting about you, and is it unsafe that one company has all this information?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And again, I cringe every time. It’s like, because Google’s going to do evil things with it. Google’s going to do stuff that makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them money with it. And maybe that’s selling it to advertisers and stuff like that, and maybe you consider that evil. But Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not going to tell your wife that you’re cheating on her. It’s not in Google’s interest to do that. Not on purpose, anyway. They’ll do it accidentally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but not on purpose. But once Google has that information, it is extremely dangerous that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anybody has that information, especially a company like Google that doesn’t care anything about you or your life. They’re just like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll protect it as best we can, but if you’re stupid and someone gets it through your error or we’re stupid and someone gets it through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our error or we’re really smart and someone just breaks in or we have a bad employee or whatever else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happens, it’s dangerous and hey, there’s no real punishment for us other than you stopping using our services,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but what are you gonna do? Use Bing? Use Hotmail? Ha ha!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Does that mean we’re done?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think so. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Ting, and Transporter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we We will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey T. Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental. They didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental. Tech podcasts so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long. What are you going to do? It’s a two-party system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Go ahead, throw your vote away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What the hell is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I actually know this one for the first time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever. Yay, Marco watches TV. Marco watches it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well, I watched

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TV, you know 12 years ago when that when that episode of the Simpsons Halloween special aired.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There you go Look at that. He knows exactly what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. Look at you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wasn’t born yet, but that’s okay. Yes, sir

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m older than Marco for Christ’s sake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know but it was convenient for You’re not you’re not Mentally and psychologically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John older Marco was aged. He’s aged by Is he got too close to the ring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for too long? spending all the time in the room with David Karp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, that should be reverse aging is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} David David’s like six years. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s how do you think he’s just it’s like a Dorian Gray Just sucks the life right out of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Actually, it’s having a kid that does it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. Yeah, that’s that’s more likely I mean, I mean geez David is like a ball of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco constant energy and enthusiasm. It’s Where’d all that energy came

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} You have to like it all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off to prevent it from seeping into you too much Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goodness. Oh man, that’s funny. Yeah, we didn’t get to talk about net

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey neutrality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} We didn’t even get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the iPad Pro. It’s been in there forever. We’ll get to it next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. And someday we will get to software methodologies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I didn’t get the AV receiver stuff. That would have been good if I had prepared for it at all, which I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We keep getting questions on Twitter from people saying, hey, when was the methodologies episode? I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I missed it. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got another one for you. When are we going to get to the fireworks factory? Marco what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, Marco doesn’t get that one. Alright, listeners will get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you want to do titles?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t see anything better than Marco bought 4. I think that’s my top

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} choice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can come around to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you see, speaking of Marco buying 4, did you see the flat LED light bulbs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, the Philips ones?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, as soon as I can buy one, I’ll order one just to try it out, but it’s getting to the point now where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s tons of pretty decent LED bulbs that are roughly 60 watts equivalent in brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for roughly $12. Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do they keep doing only 60s? I would start buying them maybe if they did 100s equivalent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well I did find a good 100 equivalent but it’s still like $55. So I bought one of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s awesome. I put it in the one pole lamp next to my desk that I was keeping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a CFL in all these years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I think I know why they’re all well. There’s probably some technical reason for the low watch, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know in terms of Marketing and selling them I think the low watch because people who have enough money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy LED light bulbs also have houses with many fixtures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And a lot of a lot of fixtures will use like like one to three 60 watt bulbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I’m saying like if you have a lot of fixtures You don’t put a hundred watt equivalent bulb in in 17 fixtures,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? whereas my house, which is ancient and decrepit, has very few fixtures, so I need those fixtures to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be super duper bright, so I will be willing to buy the highest output bulb you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can put in there, and I would love it if that didn’t actually consume 100 plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watts of electricity produced and transferring most of it to heat and putting out a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of light, too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, also, I think one of the reasons, I mean, first of all, I think the technical reason for it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco substantial and that is I believe mostly heat related because yes LEDs produce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way less heat than incandescents but they’re also a lot less tolerant of heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it’s that the heat is concentrated in a smaller area.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, I’ve heard that said. I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is just that like LEDs themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not that tolerant of operating in extremely high temperatures for a very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s probably true too because they’ll melt or whatever but like the The Philips bulb that I was talking about, the flat one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the innovation on it is they spread the things out so it dissipates heat better. It’s the same amount of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heat output, but it’s spread out. And they don’t have to put a big, giant metal heat sink on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s kind of like the air-cooled equivalent. They spread everything out in a big fan shape on this flat plane,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently that helps cooling. And it’s way cheaper to do that than it is to put a big,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive metal heat sink on the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As of January 2014, I’m pretty sure it’s now illegal to to sell or manufacture 100

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watt bulbs in the US which is why there’s all of a sudden a few a few more hundred

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watt equivalent LEDs on the market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah this there’s plenty of 100 watt equivalent CFL so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah but CFLs are so awful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah my house is filled with them and and they’re awful right I’m not as sensitive to light color as you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are apparently because they don’t bother me nearly as much as they seem to bother you and the flickering or whatever that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems to bother people doesn’t either I don’t see or it doesn’t bother me. And they take less energy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than incandescent. So I replaced all of my because they’re so cheap, like the CFLs are so cheap compared to LEDs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t think we have any incandescent left in the house. It’s all CFL.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A part of me wishes that I had more nice things, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s a slim part of me that wants like a big fancy TV like John has or has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fancy light bulbs in the house but about 99% of me is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey freaking happy that I don’t care. I’m so glad I don’t care because you know what I do when I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a light bulb? I go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and I buy whatever the first light bulb I find that fits is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s so nice. I don’t have to worry about anything. It’s great. You should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try it. I think with this audience of me and John, you’re, there’s no chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of me and John caring less about things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. Yeah, like the light bulb, I don’t notice the like quality difference as much but the stupid whatever it is the ballast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever the thing that drives the CFLs some of them buzz and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I cannot stand it’s not and it’s not like they buzz like every one of these models buzz you just get unlucky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get a buzzing one and then you just gotta either return it or get different one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my problem with CFLs was always that it was a lot like desktop Linux and Android where everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always says oh now they’re good all those problems you’ve had before with CFLs now we fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them and I go buy new ones and they’re bad still and like it’s no like and you never know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what you’re buying whether the ones you’re buying are actually good or not and it’s uh cfls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco i’ve i have spent so much money on so many cfls in so many different apartments and houses over the last five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years or 10 years and almost all of it i regret

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how is that how is that unlike leds because you keep doing the same thing with those you keep buying them and saying they’re crappy except

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for like the one that you like but then the next round comes and all the new ones are better than the the one that you liked?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Most of the ones that I’ve bought are still in full-time use in my house. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the ones I bought have actually been really good. Trust me, there’s a huge difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in satisfaction between CFLs and LEDs. CFLs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were mediocre when they were new, and then as they aged, their colors would shift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and get even worse and take longer to warm up to full brightness, and it was just a disaster. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I try, every time somebody says, oh this CFL is good, so I go try that one and it wouldn’t be. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ugh, disaster. Plus all the mercury and the complexity, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not a good scene. This is exciting. This is what people tune in for. It’s not the car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talk, it’s this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the one who does the light bulb posts on your blog. We talked about this. This is what you live for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s exciting to me. People love those posts. I get so much feedback on those posts, way more than I expect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’d rather have you buy them and find out which ones are good than me buy them and find which ones are good. When the day comes that I actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ll tell me when they get down to the price where it makes sense for me to buy them, and then I’ll look at your post and buy whichever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one you say is good. If they have more than 60 watt equivalent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I would say if you, for all the things in your house that use 40 or 60 watts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do that now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, how much are they though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re like 10 to $15

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each. Yeah, I guess maybe next time the kitchen ones go. That’s the problem with these CFLs, they last forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re all these CFLs and stuff. when the ones in the kitchen go bad, I got new ones. Well, that’ll be five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, but the problem is like CFL is like, yeah, like I said earlier, like they age poorly. You know, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually, almost always the colors will shift or the ballots will start bugging out or something like they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s another problem I have with them is you buy them thinking, oh, they’re going to last for, you know, five, 10 years, like they’re claiming and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they might, they might work for that long, but you might not want them in that long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the only one that I have to die frequently is the one in the room that I’m in now, which I think lasts like a year and a half on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John average.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah I would like to say that I also enjoy reading the LED posts on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your site, so this way I know what light bulb I’m never going to bother buying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly, it’s good to know, valuable information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh goodness, anything else going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that’s it, do you have anything else besides software methodologies?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but nobody wants to hear about that apparently. Ahem, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not my fault that news keeps happening.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’ll get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks for out time.